


Ink

by fansofcollisions



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hotel Rooms, M/M, Skin Hunger, Touching, Writing on Skin, allusions to self harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 05:57:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fansofcollisions/pseuds/fansofcollisions
Summary: Day by day, Tomas becomes convinced that Marcus' sudden aversion to short-sleeved shirts isn't just in his head.





	Ink

**Author's Note:**

> Heyo! I did not intend this to be the first, or even the second, Tomarcus fic I'd ever post, but here we are. You can thank a stressful week that made me empathize just a little too much with Marcus to stop myself from scribbling this down.

You are halfway to dozing under the dim dashboard light of a used sedan, with rain thundering on the rooftop and highway chattering beneath the rusted suspension, when you notice the markings on Marcus’ arm.

At first, you think it’s a trick of the light. The shadows of running droplets on the windshield scurry like tadpoles from the crook of his elbow down to the small of his wrist, and between the shapes sharp black lines shift, almost out of reach. You blink a few times, trying to clear the spots from your vision, and refocus.

His sleeve is rolled to a wrinkled coil just below the joint, and in the space between muscle and veins you can see the markings clearly now – twisted lines poking out from beneath the white fabric, jagged spikes deepening the creases in his skin. Each stroke hints towards a larger pattern, just out of your sight.

When Marcus eases the steering wheel around a curve, the sleeve shifts down an inch and the markings disappear from view.

Eventually, you let yourself sleep, curiousity pricking at your mind with the same insistent beat as the raindrops on the roof above.

You do not ask him, but you watch more keenly than you did before.

\---

It’s a full twelve hours before your journey abruptly pauses to allow for a decent sleep in a real bed, and a sorely needed shower, and a meal that doesn’t come pre-packaged from a gas station display case. The stop is at Marcus’ insistence, not yours. You want to keep moving, and he tells you to take a breath. That’s been the rhythm of the last eight hundred miles of road and you think as you watch him fumble with the room key, red eyes bleary from the week’s second all-night drive, _next time_ _I’ll be the one who says ‘enough’_. If you’re in the business of noticing things now, you may as well multitask.

Night comes, and you wait for Marcus to shed his button-down and throw it in the bag of all the other clothing to be washed when the two of you, bachelors till the end, finally remember to pick up more soap. You haven’t forgotten about what you glimpsed, and though the curiousity isn’t quite so burning now, it still lingers at the back of your mind. But despite his obvious exhaustion, Marcus sits at the table instead of shucking his shirt and collapsing onto the bed, and by the time you finish brushing your teeth, he’s produced a book from some hidden duffel pocket and begun to read.  

The world’s most boring game of chicken ensues, and you’re not sure if Marcus knows he’s playing, but it’s clear from the start who has the upper hand. Your stamina is weak at best, having taken the latest shift behind the wheel. Marcus can’t be much better off, but he keeps turning the pages, though you swear you can see the paper quavering beneath his touch.

Sitting on the bed is a mistake, lying down with one arm across your eyes is a graver one, and just when the telltale slump of Marcus’ shoulders hints that the end might be nigh, you make the worst mistake of all. You think, _just ten seconds won’t hurt_.

When you open your eyes again, all the lights are off, and Marcus is gone.

\---

This isn’t the first time you’ve woken to find yourself alone in a hotel room like this.

The first time, you’d searched the whole complex, frantic, fearing the worst. After a half hour of desperation, you found Marcus on the far side of the parking lot, legs hung loosely from his stone divider perch, watching the cars fly past. In the end, you left him to wait out the dawn without disturbing his quiet contemplation. By the third time, you learned that Marcus always does, in fact, always come back by morning’s light.

It doesn’t stop you from worrying.

By the time you emerge from the shower and pull your last clean shirt over dripping curls, Marcus is closing the door with his heel. In his arms, he carries two styrofoam containers of something that smells syrupy and comforting, and a small bottle of detergent. He’s still wearing the same shirt as the night before. The sleeves are rolled all the way down to his wrists.

He washes while you eat, and you don’t have any reasonable excuse to follow him into the bathroom, so when he emerges in something new and dry and unrevealing, with a bundle of wet clothes beneath his arm, you consign yourself to wait another night for your answer.

A few hundred miles of highway pass by, scenery shifting from rolling hills to dark evergreen shade. You notice his eyelids beginning to droop, and you call for a stop. He stares at you, eyes narrowed with a weighty mix of disbelief and confusion. He asks if you’re sure, and you say _yes, of course_. Something else slips into his expression, despite his obvious attempts to hide the look – a sort of cautious gratitude that stirs up a sickening ache deep within your stomach.

_Guilt_ , you think. _That’s what this is._

That night, you don’t even bother trying to spy. It feels intrusive, and you’ve already seen more today of Marcus than he wanted to show.

\---

You couldn’t be sure at the beginning, but with each passing day you become more convinced that Marcus is actively hiding his arms from you. It doesn’t take long before your mind begins to flip through the possibilities. They present themselves in the ghost of past parishioners, each with a demon tearfully confessed in the hushed safety of your office. Three likely suspects emerge from the mist: _track marks, bruises, cuts._

You don’t think Marcus is the type to shoot up-

(But can you say that for certain? How long have you known him, really?)

And no one, neither human nor demon, has been near enough to have lain a hand on him-

(Can you be sure he hasn’t disappeared more nights than the ones you’ve noticed? Can you account for every hand that might have brushed his skin?)

As for cuts-

(There would have been some other sign. You would’ve noticed before now.)

(Wouldn’t you?)

\---

You expect there to be an intervention of some sort, eventually – the sort of shoulder-clawing, tear-laden soap opera scene that would end with him angrily tearing his shirt from his chest and baring the answer to all your questions. You almost crave it, that emotional release. It might finally drain you of all the tension that comes from wondering, and worrying, and wondering if you should really be worrying at all.

Marcus is a grown man, and it’s not your responsibility to watch for his every need. That’s something it’s very easy to tell yourself, when you aren’t actually looking at him, and noticing all these little things, like the way his always-slim fingers have gotten impossibly thinner, or how he’s stopped shaving quite as often as he used to. You’re looking so much these days that it’s a wonder Marcus doesn’t catch you but somehow, whenever you look at him, he’s always looking away.

The mystery ends so much more quietly than you anticipate. You wake one night, and the air feels wrong. You open your eyes, expecting to find yourself alone again, but instead you discover that the little lamp on the far side of the room is on, and cast in its soft orange glow is Marcus, clad in a familiar white undershirt, with a book open on his lap and a pen pressed to his skin.

You raise yourself up gently, so gently, but he still spooks at the sound of your stirring. The hand holding the pen makes an aborted movement towards a sleeve that isn’t there, then comes back to rest awkwardly over the edge of his arm. He turns his gaze to the window, away from you, and you can see he’s not breathing properly. He’s not breathing at all, if you’re honest, and you wonder now how it’s possible to have spent so many nights in close company, gone through so many life-altering ordeals, and still managed to end up this frightened of each other.

You finish sitting up. He still hasn’t moved, hasn’t breathed. Like an animal caught in an open clearing, _if I don’t see you, you can’t see me_. You press forward, not wanting to take advantage of his sudden paralysis, but too spellbound to do anything else but move.

There’s an empty seat across from Marcus, and you take it. He finally flicks his eyes in your direction: first to your face, then the wrinkled collar of your t-shirt, and finally to where your hands rest, clasped at a polite distance from the centre of the little table. Too late, you realize you’ve assumed the same posture you would while counseling – open shoulders, placating smile, studiously relaxed and inviting. He sees right through it in an instant, and his jaw tightens. Your moment is slipping away. You drink in what you can, while you can.

The book in his lap is the Bible, the same battered copy he’s always kept, the one filled with notes and underlines and sprawling figures. Tonight, it’s open to a page from the book of Job, and in its margins and through tightly-packed verses carefully inked vines twist and weave. Boughs laden with delicate leaves in dark clusters separate to outline a few words and phrases – _on my eyelids there is deep darkness, though there is no violence in my hands_ – and remerge to form weightier masses until they reach the end of the text. There, the thicket of penstrokes is so dense that it’s as though the edges of the page were bordered from the start.

And then you look to his arm, and you see where the same vines grow from the bend of his elbow. They weave with the same fervour, circling freckles instead of verses, and beneath the vines you can make out the faint stain of older markings, not yet fully rubbed from the skin, in layer upon faded layer. No hint of track marks or bruises or cuts. Just ink, in a pattern as elegant as any pressed to paper.

It’s a… strange habit, maybe, but it’s nothing that unusual. Nothing shameful. Nothing that he needed to hide from you, and you take his wrist and guide his arm to rest on the table, wanting to show him so.

“These are beautiful.”

His calloused fingers twitch against your skin as you trace a path of leaves around the curve of his forearm with a light touch. When you glance up, a grin you hope is warm and non-judgemental on your face, he’s looking at you. He’s _finally_ looking at you properly, and with such a stricken expression that you almost draw back and apologize for overstepping your bounds, only…

Marcus is breathing again. Short, staccato breaths that slow, ever so slightly, as your fingers shift to the next trail of ink. You don’t stop.  

It’s almost meditative, moving from one line to the next, tracing every path and listening to the changes in Marcus’ breath. You feel, rather than see, his chest rise and fall, until you find that your own breath follows the same cadence. He still hasn’t said a word, and that should be desperately uncomfortable, and you really have no idea what you’re doing, but he doesn’t ask you to stop, and you don’t ask yourself why you don’t. You let yourself drift. Marcus closes his eyes.

A door slams somewhere outside, and you break from your reverie to realize that your careless touch has smudged the farthest reaches of the pattern, where the ink was freshest. He silences your embarrassed apology with a small smile that’s just a little too tight around the edges to be believed.

“Don’t worry. It’s an easy fix.”

Marcus takes the pen from where its fallen, forgotten, and begins retracing the ruined portions. The end result is far from clean, once-crisp lines now forever marred, but he seems satisfied, and excuses himself to the bathroom once he’s done. He doesn’t come out for a long while.

You don’t speak about it again, not for weeks, but you catch glimpses of new designs as they fade and reappear. Different patterns each time, but always the same motif: something wild and untamed, branching outward.

Sometimes, now, he notices you staring – or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, when your eyes meet, for a moment, you always catch a glimpse of that same paralysis before his gaze softens and he looks away.

He stops rolling his sleeves down, at least. You choose to believe that means more than the way he still avoids your glance. You have to believe it. If the two of you aren’t moving forward, where does that leave you?

You’ve never been very good at standing still.

**Author's Note:**

> The scene I originally set out to write is actually coming in the second half of this story, but my need for sleep is currently outweighing my need for completionism, so that'll have to wait till tomorrow to be finished.
> 
> Come find me at [my Tumblr](http://fansofcollisions.tumblr.com) if you want to wake me up by yelling about Marcus Keane for a bit.


End file.
